July 4 and a Declaration of Inter-Dependence

Stephen Covey made famous what he called The Maturity Continuum. That is, that people who are emotionally and socially growing naturally move through three stages—dependence, independence and inter-dependence.

In healthy individuals childhood through adolescence is largely a dependent stage. Late adolescence through young adulthood is the independent stage. As people become more secure in their themselves and their gifts in the world, if they continually mature, they begin shifting to the inter-dependent stage.

I thought of this model as we Americans began moving toward the celebration of July Fourth—Independence Day. Yes, there it is. The word “independence.” In this country we worship independence. We celebrate freedom from tyranny and authoritarianism.

But it also occurred to me that as a country we seem stuck in an obsessive commitment to an eternal cycle of adolescent nationalism. We have broken from our dependence on paternal figures, but our growth has stalled at the stage of individualistic, you-can’t-tell-me-what-to-do, pull-yourself-up-by-your bootstraps independence.

I grew up in a community where July Fourth was a big deal. After an evening of BBQs with family friends we drove over to the high school parking lot that sat at above the town lagoon. There fireworks were shot off from the middle of the lagoon high into the sky right above us. I remember lying on blankets staring straight up and joining in the chorus of oohs and aahs. Like clockwork, the adults around us would religiously remind us of the freedoms we enjoyed in America. They would implore us youngsters to remember that we lived in the “greatest country in the history of the world.”

I believed that then when I was an adolescent. I don’t believe that now as an adult. We may have freedom, but we have not yet grown up as a nation.

I wonder if our time is finally calling us to break through the “stalled maturation” that has us blindly worshiping independence at the cost of nurturing a community of inter-dependent relationships.

Quite honestly, it seems to me, with the growing diversity of our country, independence is killing us. We still insist on having “freedom from” when what we really need now is “freedom to.” We act as if King George is still haunting us from the grave while we grow more and more distant from our real live neighbors.

As much as I love the Declaration of Independence I wonder if we will be better served now by a Declaration of and Commitment to Inter-Dependence.

We need each other.

Next: July 4 and the New Pilgrims

Brian Heron

Cultural Innovator and Spiritual Pilgrim